The year 1849 was a year of portents. Some, such as the reappearance of the potato blight in May or the record number of evictions (13,384), were harbingers of the suffering and social upheavals to come. Two events in that year, however, both of which took place in County Kilkenny, marked an equally noteworthy but … Read more
The Cliffs of Moher have long been admired for their scenic beauty, but few know much about the man who first promoted tourism to this inspiring place. Cornelius O’Brien, a benevolent local landlord, was the first to formally recognise the cliffs as a tourist destination. Samuel Lewis reported in 1833 that O’Brien was erecting ‘an … Read more
In 1956 John Redmond’s political opponent Eamon de Valera paid a generous tribute to him as ‘a great Wexfordman . . . who worked unselfishly for the welfare of this country’. On the same occasion (the centenary of Redmond’s birth) the then taoiseach, John A. Costello, spoke of him as ‘a leader of the Movement … Read more
William O’Brien (1852–1928), from Mallow, was one of Parnell’s chief lieutenants in the 1880s. Originally a journalist with the Freeman’s Journal, O’Brien was recruited to run Parnell’s weekly United Ireland. This was the model for his own later journalistic enterprises, and his embodiment of a type of journalism that focused on the newspaper as political … Read more
Here’s a question for bibliophiles! Who wrote The war of the civilisations? No, I am not talking about Samuel Huntingdon’s 1996 tome, The clash of civilisations and the remaking of the world order. The book to which I refer comes from a radically different era. Its full title is The war of the civilisations: being … Read more